


Tannhauser Optics

by gloss



Category: Top o Nerae! Gunbuster
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, F/F, Pining, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-13
Updated: 2011-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-30 19:00:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pretty simple, really: Noriko watches Kazumi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tannhauser Optics

## 1\. +0 Earth years

They have no privacy at school. Every day is regimented, every space (classroom, dormitory, bath, RX unit) surveilled.

All the same, Noriko is never more alone than right now, watching Amano Kazumi. All noise falls away, her skin prickles and shrinks, the world empties. Amano moves so gracefully - a hand floating up to her hair, a frown that moves faster than sound - that nothing else is fully real. Noriko is smaller than a gnat, insubstantial and fevered, while she watches.

When Amano smiles, a jolt rocks through Noriko.

She isn't smiling _at_ Noriko, of course. Amano does not know Noriko exists.

Who knows the gnats that swarm and pester? Who would bother?

She is as tiny as a bug, and just as stupid. She needs to memorize each gesture Amano makes, every progress of light across Amano's skin.

Yet the harder she watches, the more difficult it becomes to remember the immediate past. As each detail fills her consciousness, it erases its predecessor, then vanishes as it, too, is succeeded.

She watches, then, with desperation and grief as well as rapture and joy.

## 2\. +15 Earth years

She hears their voices down the corridor long before she reaches Coach's office.

Kazumi's anger is a kind of glory. Stark and molten at the same time, it transforms her entire body. Raging, her cheeks darkened and eyes glittering, she is less like an ordinary human being than ever. Noriko's breath stops in her chest; her fingers curl into her palms.

She's afraid of Kazumi, and the fear lights her up from within, swells her into a paper lantern, sets her afloat.

The smear at the corner of her sight must be Coach. Like her, he is dwarfed into insignificance by Kazumi and all that Kazumi can be.

No time has passed, yet Noriko has seen Kazumi plead, cry, and rage, grow yet older, tighten and petrify. When she leaves the office, brushing past Noriko, she might as well be accelerating to warp, she has left Noriko so far behind.

Here in the hall, Noriko is still, always, a foolish child with more ambition than sense.

## 3\. +50 Earth years

In the small bath chamber, Kazumi slumps down. She tilts her head back and closes her eyes as she pours water down her front. Her breasts are small, soft things, hanging low from her bony chest and sliding back against her ropy upper arms. Her waist, always so trim and neat, is ductile, her tummy paunch soft as pudding. The hair at her crotch and under arms is silver and white, loosely crimped and woolly.

When she opens her eyes, however, her gaze is as sharp and _knowing_ as it ever was. Fine wrinkles, hairline and even thinner, criss-cross her face; deeper ones radiate from her eyes and descend from her nose to bookend her twisting, smirking mouth.

"I see you," she says. "Will you be joining me?"

Noriko cannot exhale. Her breath has solidified in her throat. She moves forward leadenly.

She turned 21, more or less, last week. She has known Kazumi, then, for one-quarter of her life, fifty years of Kazumi's.

Others, as they settle next to this handsome old lady, might discern hints of the glamorous upperclassman she once was, traces of the passionate young woman she grew into, reminders of the severely composed officer she became.

Noriko, however, sees it all, together, the depth of Kazumi's dark eyes and wide smile. The way her body has shrunk in some places (limbs, face) and expanded in others (tummy, chin) is entirely natural, an accentuation and token of all the time she has seen.

Time, and the world, have always dilated in Noriko's scrutiny of Kazumi. There are not a succession of Kazumis, just this one, all of her, watching Noriko back.


End file.
